And although, the contemporary world deliberately puts the stress on change and 'the new', the traditional academic systems are challenged by the great juggernaut of global­ ized transformation on the level of the particular and the local.

I. Research and Knowledge in the Information Age: Selected Feminist Approaches.- Transnationalizing Tertiary Education in a Global Information Society.- Open and Virtual Universities.- Compromising Women: Teaching Composition Online and at a Distance in the United States.- The Material Foundation of Virtual Subjectivity.- ICT-Representations as Transformative Critical Rooms.- II. The vifu Project: Inside and Outside Assessments.- Driven by User-Orientation, Participation and Interaction: vifu — Virtual Women’s University (www.vifu.de).- Computer Training at vifu: Digging Out Curiosity.- Lessons to be Learned from the Project and Process of Supported E-Learning at the Virtual Women’s University.- Intelligent Online Knowledge Resources for Instructional Learning. Computer-Supported and Computer-Aided Design for Online Knowledge Resources.- The Users’ vifu.- Information Architecture and Networks at vife — Continuation of the Project in 2002.- The Hype and the Morning After — What We Have Learned about E-Learning.- III. From Traditional University to Networks of Shared Knowledge and Learning.- Women on the Net: the Internet as a Tool for Social Transformation.- How ICT Plays a Role in Social Movement — The Case of Africa.- Productive Differences — Virtual Networks Call For Heterogeneity.- Authors.

One of the major driving forces behind the international Women´s University was the interest in changing the traditional university. In its pursuit of this goal, the projekt vifu (the Virtual International University) combined the overall focus on gender with a conceptual stress on virtuality as a potential inroad to transform and innovate the established academic system. This collection presents results and critical evaluations of the vifu as a feminist project designed in flavor of change. In addition to this, the volume presents and discusses projects which theoretically and practically integrate the new ICTs into their departure to new horizons in higher education and research and at the same practice a particular sensitivity towards gender as a social category. The authors of this anthology share the perspective on the category of gender and ICT-related developments summed up by "virtuality" as potential tools for transforming traditional academia. While change is not considered as a quality per se, each contribution makes its case for specific kinds of "making new". In doing so, they also seek answers to the questions of a democratic and socially responsible knowledge production and distribution in the 21 st century.